Michael Pollan writes about how US farm policy keeps the prices of fattening and unhealthy foods artificially low, while allowing prices on things like fruits and vegetables to rise. Why, he asks, would we want to encourage such a situation, especially if we face an “epidemic” of obesity?

He also points out how this connects to a variety of social and environmental ill: subsidized grain helps make industrial meat production possible (by substituting corn-based feed for more natual grass), artificially low prices provide unfair competition to impoverished foreign growers, it affects the health of the soil by promoting “chemical and feedlot agriculture,” and so on.

His contention is that farm policy needs to be reworked with the interests of eaters in mind, not just the interests of big producers from a handful of agricultural states. “[M]ost of us assume that, true to its name, the farm bill is about “farming,” an increasingly quaint activity that involves no one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake. This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to treat it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting a handful of their Midwestern colleagues.”

Since the status quo is far from being the inevitable outworkings of a free market, Pollan suggests that food policy be reworked to “encourage farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for food processors and on rebuilding local food economies” and “to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above its quantity.”